What the Mexican maize fiasco has demonstrated to me is that the press
is almost entirely unaccountable for what they say. Some serve an agenda.
For George Monbiot the agenda is what I have come to call the anti-corporate
faith.

The server at Berkeley crashing took out Quist and Chapela's email,
but it also took out email of the authors of one critique (Kaplinsky et
al). Though Conko and I have both written in to Agbioview, we have never
exchanged so much as a single message with each other. My research is publicly
funded, and my political stance is far from rightwing. The difference between
Monbiot and Rush Limbaugh is which wing is flapping.

Dr Matthew Metz
Department of microbiology, University of Washington
metzilla@u.washington.edu

***

2. NGIN Comment on Metz's letter

According to Matt Metz, co-author of one of the two letters critcising
Chapela and Quist's work published in Nature, "Though Conko and I have
both written in to Agbioview, we have never exchanged so much as a single
message with each other. My research is publicly funded, and my political
stance is far from rightwing."

For a moderate unsullied by contact with the likes of Conko, Metz has
a curious choice of bedfellows.

In March 2000 Metz collaborated on the production of a special questions
and answers sheet called 'critical issues in agricultural biotechnology'.
The document hypes Metz's scientific credentials, describing him as 'Professor,
University of California at Berkeley', although at the time he was only
a graduate student.
[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~iazelaya/Newsletter_Vol_1_No_3-Addendum.pdf]

Andrew Apel, editor of the industry newsletter, AgBiotech Reporter ­
one of the most extreme of Prakash's supporters. Apel used the Sept 11
attacks to put forward the view that critics of GE, like Drs Mae-Wan Ho
and Vandana Shiva, had "blood on their hands".

and

Gregory Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and co-founder
of the AgBioWorld Foundation - the man Metz says he's never exchanged so
much as an e-mail with.

The document Metz worked on for agBioWorld can be found on its website
but, funnily enough, it now omits Matt Metz's role in compiling it:
http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech_info/articles/critical.html